Getting so tired of HN, every thread has these kinds of vague, ignorant, semi-political comments. Just a throwaway opinion with some unrelated quote to appear smart, not related to the posted link, nothing added to the discussion.
The Suez Crisis happened 70(!) years ago, the article is talking about where modern day UK spends its money. It's literally right there in the opening sentence, if you only bothered to open it:
>Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke?
Aside from strictly technical topics, this community is now worse than Reddit.
I think far too much effort was spent building critical frameworks in social sciences without the lesson sticking that it is a two way street. You build the critical framework to frame specific criticisms. By doing that, you can highlight influences that may be missed in another framing.
Which isn't a bad thing. But the key there is in building frameworks. Instead, we seem to have built large portions of the public into thinking these are the only frameworks that matter. And so everything has to be tied back to them.
The cultural emphasis HN has on original commentary and not doing low-effort link posting has its costs. Sometimes an FAQ model is just a superior line of inquiry.
The most plausible models for UK decline that I've encountered come from a Youtuber named Britmonkey.
He talks about housing as _ongoing existential crisis_, contra widespread apathy on the subject, and about how since Thatcher, the political rule has tended to integrate the worst aspects of center-left and center-right governments.
Ezra Klein's _Abundance_ has been in the news lately, and there are some very similar arguments made there, focused on the US context.
Yeah, Founders don't post here anymore, they are busy chatting on some secret message boards and group chats the riff-raff don't have access to. This site is now for bitter tech workers and wannabes and the comments reflect it. I'm guilty of being a member of that class I admit, and I'm not doing much to elevate things but the discourse has become incredibly uninteresting as a result.
I read the article. My comment was prompted by this:
> One reason for this is that parts of the British state are fundamentally misaligned with goals like ‘improving living standards’ or ‘increasing wealth’, whether that’s through hand-wringingly incompetent procurement processes, long-term failure to invest in the infrastructure and management required to support ‘moar frontline staff!!’, acute treasury brain, or endless cohorts of committees and quangos.
> The current level of ambition, of vision, just doesn’t match up to the situation we’re in.
It’s about a failure of state capacity. The article’s entire argument hinges on why British institutions can no longer turn wealth into functioning systems. The post-imperial loss of strategic vision among British elites is not a distraction: it’s the historical foundation of the current malaise.
Suez was the moment Britain exited the world stage and never figured out what it stood for domestically in the vacuum that followed.
You can’t talk about the failure to invest, coordinate, or reform over decades without asking why the ruling class stopped trying.
Of course not. The entire time Trump is railing against the deficit, he's talking only about goods. He wants to bring back manufacturing to America, didn't you hear?
By quoting "far-left" the poster is indicating that he himself does not believe that Obama is far left but that it is something someone has said or written about Obama.
>hey’d see kids after dark at the school and just assume we were up to no good.
That sounds totally crazy to me, did these people get into any trouble or fined for just calling the police like that? I assume you're american, in my eastern european country they would NOT be happy about getting called 5 times for this...
It's not entirely impossible to get fined or arrested for calling the police in the US but you have to go extremely far out of bounds. Calling the police because there are kids near the school (hehe) is completely acceptable.
If anything it's the opposite: if you do anything slightly out of the usual - all the way to walking through a neighborhood that doesn't know you - there is a good chance someone will call the police. And that some patrol car will check it out just for breaking the dullness of the day.
Some of the cops who respond (because they might ALL head there, if it sounds fun enough), some will be smiling and relaxed and civil, while others will be very much looking for trouble and aggressive from the start. Such that for example, using plastic pistols in dark or day in public is a serious bad idea in the US.
Can confirm. As a high schooler, I used to meet up with friends in the middle of the night at an elementary school playground. Mostly we would just swing on the swings and chat. Occasionally we'd share a 6-pack of beer, shame on us.
One night, somebody called the cops, who called school district security. When they drove up we left without saying hi because we get it, we're not wanted here.
Well they called the cops back, who chased us down (we ran, 'cause we were stupid). I was apprehended and from the back of the cop car I counted six other cop cars and a helicopter all looking for my friends for the crime of being near a school at night (the cops never mentioned the beer).
Some cop noticed the beer, most likely - and they were one of the good guys.
Another one might have taken this opportunity to start an in-depth "investigation" (read "bullying spree") to figure out who sold the beer and who bought it and passed it on (if anyone in that bunch might plausibly have been underage.)
Seems likely. It's still weird to me that it was worth all of that taxpayer money to keep the helicopter in the sky while they searched for my friends (most of whom took to the storm sewer and were not caught).
Our community has to stage mock events to give these folks some practice. We burn funds every once in a while on purpose to maintain readiness as we suppose. If you plan ahead, you can include hotdogs and soda in the budget.
Yeah that makes sense. We weren't large enough to justify it though. They cancelled the program a few years later (2010ish). I haven't seen a police helicopter over this town since.
I live in a town of less than 3000 people and regularly see/hear the local county shariff's military grade helicopter loitering around for no good reason.
You may be right, but as a former resident of several towns of a similar size hearing a helicopter almost always meant somebody was in critical care and going to a big hospital.
Ours was obvious, at least at night, because it was typically shining its spotlight on some spot on the ground.
Sometimes it would follow you around with the spotlight until a squad car came and pulled you over and accused you of a crime which a similar vehicle was involved with. In my case, the not-me truck was illegally harvesting rock from a park, but my truck bed was visibly empty from the sky so I don't know why they bothered summon the car.
The difference is that those helicopters don't just loiter around or hover over residential neighborhoods - they land at the nearest open field (in my case the town has a small airport) and immediately transport the patient 60 miles to a hospital. The helicopter I am talking about is definitely a military style helicopter and I'm 99% sure it's operated by the county sheriff's department. Gotta justify that budget somehow and there isn't much more fun way to do that than getting to play with big-boy-toys like helicopters.
Once when it happened to me and the whole gang responded, the "lead responder" was clear that he considered that this was a bullshit call and that WE totally had the right to do what we were doing and HE was sorting out a nuisance call to the police. He may also have been playing "good cop" - it's not like I was trusting him. While one of his buddies had parting words for me: "Do you realize what it looked like <insert saucer eyes>?" and "It could have been XXXXX, so of course police has to respond."
About a helicopter, the problem is compounded because that whole outfit needs some quota of flying hours to remain certified. It might be a boring area, and any opportunity to take it out and fly then counts as training, if nothing else can be written up for that flight. That there is a helicopter guarantees that it will be used. And same for SWAT and such.
I bought alcohol for some underage people who asked one time, not perceiving it as a risk because who could tell why I was buying it or watch me give it away? Not until today did I understand what could have happened.
I like to say that in suburban USA, it’s illegal to be underage in public after dark. Cops will harass you for no reason, detain you for no crime, question you with no motive other than to try to peg you with a crime, on the assumption that you don’t know your rights and won’t assert them. If you try to assert your rights they will work harder to try to put a crime on you. And then we wonder why our kids get addicted to screens and don’t leave the house. It’s insanely fucked up and it stems from bored cops fucking with kids because they have nothing better to do.
Can’t speak for the whole country, but in the Midwest, rural community I grew up in, people had a “better safe than sorry” attitude, and would call police on mere suspicion that you were up to no good or that something was amiss.
Even told them afterward how wrong they were, they’d probably shrug and say it was still good for the police to check.
i’ve had the cops called on me frequently for stuff like breaking into my own house?? they’re also really on edge, i’ve had them shout at me to take my hands out of my pockets which… fair i guess?
not to stereotype, but America just has lots of SAHM busybody types
It sounds that the neighboirs doing those calls, did it
to cause problems for the poster above, not to be helpful (basically harassment via fake calls to the police).
I bet they would NOT call the cops if real thieves showed up.
The more calls the police get, the more money they are able to justify by pointing to the amount of calls received.
And, I think, generally it would be a much more enjoyable call to go talk to some parents about a few kids, than to respond to more demanding complaints.
Yeah. I cringe that this mentality is also exported from the US to other countries. I firmly believe that breaking a leg, getting lost in the woods for an hour, being able to play somewhere without any adult supervision, really made me a stronger, more capable, stress-resistant adult.
>Autism simply got tied up with entitlements and the diagnosis has been grossly abused as a lever to get access to said entitlements
I just love when narrowminded Americans (I would wager 1000$ that the poster is from that country) assume the thing that happens in their city/state/country is a worldwide phenomenon with the rest of us 8 billion people.
And even better writing in this snarky obfuscating style so the rest of us don't have a clue what they're talking about. Entitlements???
In my (EU) country talking about your mental issues is simply not done, let alone your actual diagnosis.
At least ss is an acceptable and widley understood replacement for ß.
My last name end on "ić" so every time, even on many EU shops and websites, I get to choose if I want to write my name wrong with "ic" and definitley get the package(cause the post understands) or write my name properly and get my package in 90% of cases.
Its just plain weird that a Spanish/French/UK online shop will support their weird characters but not full Unicode.
> I get to choose if I want to write my name wrong ... and definitley get the package ... or write my name properly and get my package in 90% of cases.
every time i walk into a coffee shop i have to judge how much trouble spelling my name 'correctly' will be and will switch to "Y" in those cases
like, I thought Joachim was supposed to blaze the trail for the rest of us soft J's :(
I find it really difficult to imagine how are people OK with bringing new children into this world, I don't even live in a particulary poor or horrible country.
In many ways it’s the best world to bring kids into, ever. As a middle class American I live better than an Egyptian pharaoh.
Except that a cloud of uncertainty hangs over it.
But a cloud of uncertainty is not worse than, say, constant starvation and plagues or eternal tribal wars. Would you bring a child into the world of the black plague? The Bronze Age collapse?
There has never been and will never be a utopia, especially one that can project into the future without fear. Having children means both blessing and cursing them with existence in a universe that apparently is not safety tested.
Brave new world.